Giorgi Gobronidze has a unique perspective on artificial intelligence (AI) and its developing place in the world and society. An academic in the field of international relations, Giorgi Gobronidze is also the owner of PimEyes – an online face search engine that uses artificial intelligence to search the Internet and find pictures containing given faces. PimEyes allows customers to find faces and check where the image appears online, helping people protect their privacy.
For Giorgi Gobronidze, it’s unsurprising that people are worried about AI. New ideas and technologies are always met with a certain amount of cynicism.
“Honestly, it has only really been a few centuries since people got used to the idea that Earth was not flat,” says Giorgi Gobronidze. “In the 17th century and 16th century, people ended up in an inquisition for saying that the Earth was round. Even television, when it was invented, was perceived as a box of a devil. Even in my childhood, I heard preaching in church that TV and modern technology was a young evil. And yes, I know that people will be concerned and will be afraid of AI technologies.”
A hundred years ago, science fiction familiarized the idea of artificially intelligent robots in stories like the “heartless” Tin man in the Wizard of Oz and the humanoid robot in the classic movie Metropolis. By the 1950s, scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers like British polymath Alan Turing were exploring the mathematical possibility of artificial intelligence.
Since the 1990s, technology has evolved exponentially. Just 10 years ago, no machine could reliably provide language or image recognition at a human level. Yet recently AI systems have become so capable they now beat humans in many recognition tests. In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT as a large language model–based chatbot that lets users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language used. In short, it can generate text like a human, and is one of the best examples of AI as it stands today.
AI is also being used to create images that look real. It is deployed in Manufacturing robots, self-driving cars, smart assistants, healthcare management, automated financial investing and even marketing chatbots.
AI has its detractors. Most notably, entrepreneur Elon Musk has warned that artificial intelligence poses a tremendous danger. “The consequences of AI going wrong are severe so we have to be proactive rather than reactive,” he said after a Senate hearing in Washington, DC, in September 2023.
As the owner of PimEyes, Giorgi Gobronidze has seen what AI can – and can’t do – first hand, as well as the public’s reaction to the technology.
“Even now, many people – and when I say many people, I don’t mean just the average statistical human being, but officials and representatives of the security sector – do not see the difference between artificial intelligence and artificial personality. When I mention that I work in the field of AI, people think we have educated clever robots that one day will take over us,” said Giorgi Gobronidze. “There are fears about artificial intelligence. However, what I can say from my perspective, is that it has already become part of our everyday life and it is changing every aspect of our life – mostly for the better.”
AI now helps medical professionals diagnose illness faster. It finds solutions to complex problems. It helps workers become more efficient in their day to day jobs.
Much of the fear over AI, says Giorgi Gobronidze, comes from the fast pace of change. The industrial revolution took place over many decades. The perception of most people is that AI has changed the world in a matter of months.
“ChatGPT started the revolution. I don’t know how it’ll end up, because it is already shaping a world which is based and built on respective copyright, and other ways of thinking,” says Giorgi Gobronidze. “Very soon we will have books written by artificial intelligence. We already have images made by artificial intelligence. The world has already outlived and survived and evolved with the First Industrial Revolution. Now we have the second one.”
And there are things to be cautious about, says Giorgi Gobronidze – particularly in the labor market.
“Many professions simply will disappear, but this does not mean that professions will disappear totally, because as one profession disappears another profession emerges,” says Giorgi Gobronidze. “It means we will all have to reshape our skills or adjust to the new requirements – and that’s a bit problematic for some. It is not very easy to change professions. I have done it several times and I know how difficult that can be.”
A good example of where AI will dramatically change the labor force is in the information market – which includes vocations like researchers, copywriters and journalists. The linguistic models underlying technology like ChatGPT bring “absolutely new vision” to these roles, says Giorgi Gobronidze.
“If data can be crawled, and gathered, and generated at the same time by machines, why do we need content writers and journalists? Why do we need these people when artificial intelligence can do [the job of finding information and writing about it], when all that is required is two technicians sitting there and maintaining the whole system?” Giorgi Gobronidze asks.
From his own academic life as a social scientist, Giorgi Gobronidze uses his experience of SPSS as an example.
Created by IBM in the 1960s and widely used throughout the social sciences, SPSS is a statistical software suite for data management, advanced analytics, multivariate analysis, business intelligence, and criminal investigation.
“I have been studying SSPS for my social research, but now it is very easy to be done by artificial intelligence instead of me. So what I’m doing now is, I would not make quantitative analysis. Instead I would do qualitative analysis, because there are machines that can do the quantitative analysis for me,” says Giorgi Gobronidze. “It means that I simply have to know how to use the technology, and I’m gaining an advantage over my counterparts and rivals on the labor market.”
In terms of the pros and cons of AI in the labor market, Giorgi Gobronidze thinks there is a very clear example in human history. And that is the gun.
“AI looks like more firearms, because once the firearm was invented, for example, military service became cheap and easy, because it did not require special training to shoot a gun,” says Giorgi Gobronidze. “But at the same time, before firearms, it might take a years before you would master the sword or ax, for example. In this case, labor [i.e. the soldier] becomes easier. It becomes massive. And that’s another problem.”
